Non-Causality is a variation on Agent-Causality, the idea that agents can start new causal chains that are not pre-determined by the events of the immediate or distant past and the physical laws of nature.

For Ginet, there is no chance involved in his volition, his mental event that has a certain "actish" quality, an event not causally necessitated by antecedent events, but simply determined and controlled by him.

Every action, according to me, either is or begins with a causally simple mental action, that is, a mental event that does not consist of one mental event causing others. A simple mental event is an action if and only if it has a certain intrinsic phenomenal quality, which I've dubbed the "actish" quality and tried to describe by using agent-causation talk radically qualified by "as if": the simple mental event of my volition to exert force with a part of my body phenomenally seems to me to be intrinsically an event that does not just happen to me, that does not occur unbidden, but it is, rather, as if I make it occur, as if I determine that it will happen just when and as it does (likewise for simple mental acts that are not volitions, such as my mentally saying "Shucks!"). A simple mental event's having this intrinsic actish phenomenal quality is sufficient for its being an action. But its having the quality entails nothing either way as to whether it satisfies the incompatibilist requirement for free action (which is that it not be causally necessitated by antecedent events).

An action may be causally complex, may consist of a simple mental action plus consequences of it. For example, my action of voluntarily pushing with my arm and hand against a door begins with a volition, a simple mental act of willing to exert a certain force in a certain direction with my arm and hand, and consists further in that volition's causing my arm and hand to exert such a force. My action of opening the door has a still further component of the door's opening being caused by the force exerted against it by my arm and hand.

Now, as I explained earlier, if an event is not an action of mine — for example, the door's opening — then I can make that event occur only by causing it, that is, by performing some action that causes it. But I make my own free, simple mental acts occur, not by causing them, but simply by being their subject, by their being my acts. They are ipso facto determined or controlled by me, provided they are free, that is, not determined by something else, not causally necessitated by antecedent states and events.

Ginet is an incompatibilist who argues that reasons can be considered as causal explanations for actions, but that reasons themselves are "non-causal," allowing us to escape from causal determinism. What he claims is that (contra Donald Davidson) the truth of a reasons explanation of an action does not require that the explaining reason-states (beliefs, desires, etc.) caused the action; but he allows that their causing the action is compatible with the reasons explanation.